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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,366
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
- Games I like
- Sundry, mostly board
- Books I like
- Science fiction, fantasy, some historical fiction
Comments
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(Quote) The main spoiler was that we all felt the title was basically clickbait, and should have been "12th century BC: the century when something big happened in the ancient world of Late Bronze societies, but we're not exactly sure when or to…
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I'll set up the discussion area then
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Looks like it's available in kindle and paperback here in the UK
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Fine by me, I haven't heard of that series before
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And this is a good enough time to remind everyone about A Master of Djinn by P Djeli Clark...
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(Quote) I guess the problem is that you risk simply setting up a row of straw men rather than having different viewpoints presented credibly. True, Babel did occasionally put up an opposite side but this was generally put in the mouths of fairly loa…
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I gave Babel 4* (albeit a low 4 if I had such flexibility) - I thought the prose, grammar and basic concept were good, and I never felt at risk of abandoning reading it. We've all talked about the shortcomings, especially the failure to maintain goo…
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The same sort of questions arise in many different areas of writing. For example, we want dialogue to "sound natural" (especially external dialogue between people, probably less so internal reported thoughts), but in fact actual dialogue i…
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Etymologically, as no doubt RF Kuang would have made use of, telegraph comes from "writing at a distance". There's a Telegraph Hill not all that far from where my parents lived, part of the Admiralty chain from London to the dockyards at …
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(Quote) I agree - surely in an alternate England (or wherever) of that era there would have been wealthy individuals or groups arguing for emancipation of various kinds - our Europe in the C19th was a right furore of groups of all kinds wanting chan…
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Which is odd given the Christian theological position that Christ is the Word of God, and hence one can easily imagine a whole in-book theology building on words as divine vessels.
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(Quote) Yes, that bothered me a bit - the footnotes waver between giving information that's true in the real world to information that's only true in the sub-created world, and I found this inconsistency annoying. (Quote) What a great catch! Accord…
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@Apocryphal your words reminded me of another film, in this case Enemy at the Gates, where Danilov says to Zaitsev "We tried so hard to create a society that was equal, where there'd be nothing to envy your neighbour. But there's always somethi…
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> @Apocryphal said: > So, here's an interesting thing. While I was reading this book, I was also listening to another book called The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. This book is about the aspects of a story that makes it pleasing to t…
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Over in the UK I might have said "signalled" instead of "telegraphed" but I got the drift. I'm not sure I agree with @clash_bowley about this as there are lots of chops and changes in the sections he never reached, and some of th…
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Yes that's a good way to put it
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(Quote) I tended to agree with you, after continuing to the end. I make some comments about this in @NeilNjae 's starter for part 2 on gaming that maybe will resonate with your thoughts on this.
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Not so much about gaming but these are thoughts I had about the world-building. First, I became less and less convinced by the whole silver / translation magic scheme. I think (and others will no doubt correct me if wrong) that a magic scheme in a …
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Hmm, mixed feelings here. I found the writing itself to be good - fluent, competent, well-researched and so on. Well edited too: I don't recall any glaring typos or grammatical flops. I've already said how I found that the characters became less…
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Haha I should have read this before rabbiting on about Extinction Rebellion in the last starter! The connection which (I think) you are making with big tech and social media is not one that had occurred to me, but it's an interesting one... thoug…
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I kind of felt that in the end there wasn't a lot to choose between them. Lovell (and the ruling group that he represented) was prepared to subordinate anybody else's interest, health, life etc to their own... but so was Robin. The whole business of…
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I kind of got bored with the one-dimensionality of lots of the characters. And it seemed inconsistent - at one stage the main three are saying how they never met an Englishman they liked or trusted, but a very short time later they are both liking a…
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I found it interesting that the factory workers were the more "professional" in terms of how to conduct a rebellion, and also more realistic when it came to the time to stand down (presumably, for the time being). I wasn't sure what Ku…
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This was one of the things that didn't work for me.
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Starting at the end... yes I think the two-part read was a good idea in this case and for longer books in general. The book itself - I found myself disappointed with development after what I thought was a very strong parts 1 and 2. The storyline …
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All: I have added a category for January's read, A Master of Djinn by P Djeli Clark, and added the blurb and so on to that category. A good time to update notification preferences perhaps...
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I'm thinking of A Master of Djinn by P Djeli Clark, a kind of fantasy steampunk novel set in an alternative 1912 Cairo. I don't think we've read it before. It won several awards including Nebula in 2021 and is IMHO a lot of fun.
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(Quote) In that case in terms of the regular rotation we're looking at me in January, @clash_bowley in Feb and @Apocryphal in March
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> @Apocryphal said: > Richard then Barner, I think. I think so too (unless @WildCard wants to leap in :) )
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@NeilNjae said: (Quote) Language and translations thereof seem so important to the book, and more generally to Kuang, that I very much doubt she didn't think about this. My bet is the use of modern terms is a conscious choice here.